by Urban Waite
The last time he’d seen her she had been a teenager, just old enough to work the bar. But that was a long time ago. A very long time since he’d come to the church and gave his soul over to The Father and divorced himself from all he’d known.
* * *
MARY MAY CAME ON THEM JUST AS THEY WERE FINISHING THEIR dinner, and one of them rose now to meet her. He walked out to her from under the tree where they had their fire and their cookpot. She said hello and watched him where he stood. The sun was already in the trees to the west and soon it would be gone all together. Only saying a few words to her in Spanish, he motioned for her to come over and to sit and eat with them.
There were two of them, a father and his teenage son and it had been the father who had invited her to share their dinner. They were eating corn tortillas heated in a pan set by the fire and in the pot simmered a kind of thick stew of meat and beans and spices that smelled of some other world she had not known existed here, but that caused her mouth to water. A bowl was fixed and tortillas given. She sat and ate as they watched her. When she had eaten one tortilla and started on the other, running it around the sides of the bowl and using it to clean the edges, the man asked his son something, then the son spoke to her in English, asking what had brought her here.
“I’m looking for my brother,” she said.
The son told his father then turned and looked at her again. “Is he lost?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” she said. The sheep were grazing the high meadow and she looked out on them and ran her eyes across the country. She was trying to see it all before the light was gone and she marked a notch to the north where she thought she might pass through. When she brought her eyes back to the fire and the herders who sat around it, she asked how far away the Church of Eden’s Gate was from where they were now sitting.
“Está buscando por la iglesia?” the father asked. His face had turned and he was watching her. “Es una mala iglesia.”
Mary May looked from the father to the son and waited for the boy to translate.
“He says it is a bad place,” the son said. “They have tried several times to talk with our employer. They have tried to push him, to get him to give over the sheep and to bring him around to their way of thinking.”
“They have done the same to many,” she said. “They are trying to do the same to me.” She wiped the last of the stew up with the remaining tortilla then folded it and put it to her mouth.
“They come sometimes at night and they take a sheep. They are like wolves. They are thieves and soon, if our employer keeps losing his livestock and the money they produce, he will have no choice but to give them over for the pennies they are offering.”
“The same has been done to me,” she said. “They have turned away alcohol I need for my bar in town, in Fall’s End. They have cut me off from many of my distributors and scared half of them away.”
“They want too much,” the boy said. “They think it all belongs to them. But this land belongs to no one. It is for the people, for the sheep, it is for you to walk across and to go whichever way you please.”
She looked from one to the next then thanked them for the dinner. She stood and handed back the bowl they had given her.
“A dónde vas?” the father asked.
“To get my brother,” she said.
“Él está con ellos?”
“Yes,” she said. She could see him thinking all this through. He stood and asked her if she would stay. He told her there was an extra blanket, that she was welcome to it. He said that it would be dark soon and he did not want her to lose her way.
He left and went back in beneath the trees again. A minute later he came out riding a big roan horse, kicking it with his heels to set it into a trot. A rifle sat beside him in an aged leather scabbard and she could see the worn wood of the buttstock. She looked after him as he went then turned to the son with the question in her eyes.
“The rifle is for the wolves, whatever form they take.”
“Has it become that bad?”
“It is hard to say. It is hard to say until you are in it and you must decide. I am not sure how bad it is, but I truly cannot say. Time will tell.”
“And your father?” she asked. She looked after the rider on the horse, his dark shape moving through the gray light above, the sheep moving all around him, turned away as if the horse itself were a boat breaking through the waves. “He would shoot them?”
“He will go out and give the sheep one last look before it is full dark,” the son said. He had begun to clean the big pot out and to wash it with a bit of water and a cloth. “He is a herder. He has always been a herder. To take away his herd is to end his life. You understand?” He went on washing. When he looked up at Mary May again, he asked, “Your brother is a believer?”
“I don’t know if he is or if he isn’t,” she said. “I don’t know him anymore. I guess I haven’t known him for a while.”
“We hear things sometimes,” the boy said. “We hear their chanting, or their singing. We hear voices in the woods and sometimes we see their fires. Some are believers,” he said. “Others are less so. And it’s these that always have it the hardest for what they think they are entering is a world defined by the mercy of God, but the place they have come is not a place of God, but a place of sinners and the word of The Father has little bearing on God, and instead The Father’s words are used to enslave them.”
She stood watching him and then she turned to look to where his own father was rounding the sheep in the high pasture lands above. When she turned back to the boy, she said, “You’re a knowledgeable kid.”
He finished with the pot then set it aside and started in on the bowls and the big ladle they had used for serving. “Just because we live out here does not mean we are blind to what is going on in town, and in all the corners of this county. Sometimes it is the distance itself, either physical or emotional, that lets you see with the most clarity.”
* * *
THEY HAD STOPPED AT THE FOOT OF THE RIDGE WHEN THE DARK had come and they had eaten from the supplies Will had packed. They made a small fire and Will watched the twigs and small bits of wood fall away within the dancing heat while Lonny rolled a cigarette and told Will that he hoped tomorrow they would find her.
Will said he hoped so, too. But that he was unsure what good it would do her or do the church to bring her in. “She is not a believer,” Will said. “Her family has always hated the church and I don’t see how bringing her in would change that.”
“It is better to have her under control than to have her loose out there,” Lonny said. He lit the cigarette and sat smoking. “She was talking to the sheriff before all this.”
“What was she saying to him?”
“Nothing of any truth,” Lonny said. “But she is casting doubt upon The Father and upon the church and I think that alone is something John cannot stand about her.”
“I knew her as a kid,” Will said. “She was strong-willed even then. I don’t expect she’s changed much since.”
“We will see,” Lonny said. He smoked the cigarette and looked in on the flames, then when he was done he flicked the cigarette away into the fire. Five minutes later he was asleep.
Will watched the fire until it was only an incandescent flicker of coal there at the bottom of the pit he had constructed from loose stones he’d found nearby. He thought of the bear cub and how he had wanted to save it, but that in the end he had not been able to.
That night for the first time in a long time he dreamt of his daughter. She had always liked him to sit up by her bed and she would not go to sleep unless he was there next to her. When she had been young she would wake up screaming if she found the chair empty and him not there. Will dreamt of her there in bed with her eyes closed but her mind still wide awake.
“You won’t leave me?” she said.
“No. I’m going to sit right here.”
“Even when I fall asleep you’ll be right there?”
�
�Yes,” he said. “I’m going to be right here. I’m going to be looking over you and I’ll never leave you.”
“What about Mamma?” she asked.
“What about her?”
“Who is looking over her?”
“I am. I am watching over both of you.”
“Even while you’re watching over me?”
“Yes,” he said. He observed her for a while. He listened to her breathing. He heard the way her breath changed as she went to sleep. He was sitting in the old room that had been hers, sitting in the house that had been his and his wife’s and that had sat up above on the bluff. And in the dream, he could see out on the landscape through the bedroom window and there was a golden and full character to the land that seemed to him like the dry wheat of a field seen just before the harvest.
He got up from the chair and went out of the room and closed the door. He stopped for a moment, knowing his daughter was in there and that she was safe and that she was alive. Now he went and looked for his wife, but he could not find her. He stood in the kitchen and looked out on the same field. It was dark now, nothing to see but his own reflection in the glass and it seemed to him that the house had changed and that much was missing in the reflected glass of the world behind him.
When he turned from the window he heard his daughter’s piercing scream, calling for him, calling for him to come and get her like he had done when she was a little girl and she would wake up startled to find herself alone.
He was at her door as if he had simply found it waiting there but each time he turned the knob it would not unlock and he could hear her screaming for him, asking where he was, asking for him to come and find her. He kept turning the knob in his hand and it was doing nothing and he knew without a doubt that something horrible was happening that he could not stop, that even in his home there was nothing he could do to help her.
He woke with a start, and he could not stop coughing. It was still an hour before the dawn would come, but he could see the light building in the east. He held a hand to his mouth and racked his lungs and felt something stir within him and come loose. He spit it from his mouth and sat staring at it. Mucus, dark and evil looking there on the ground like some Precambrian life form brought forth from within the mud.
After an hour he was still awake, just lying there watching above as the sun chased the last remaining stars from out of the sky. On the ground beside him, dark as a pool of tar was the blackened and drying blood of an ulcer or some other wickedness he had brought up from somewhere deep inside.
* * *
THE BOY WOKE HER IN THE MORNING WITH A HAND HELD OUT across her shoulder and as she opened her eyes he backed away toward the fire and he sat again and stirred whatever it was he had been making there in the pot. His father sat beside him, both of them there like they had never left, still wearing the same clothes and sitting in the same place.
“Estabas hablando,” the father said.
She shook her head to show she did not understand then looked toward the boy and waited.
“You were talking in your sleep,” the boy said. Using the ladle, he scooped dark liquid from within the pot then put it in a bowl and handed it to her. He was back at the fire again when she looked up. She sniffed the bowl, blew on it then put the liquid to her lips and tasted it. “Coffee?” she said. “Gracias.”
“De nada,” the father said. The boy nodded, dipping the ladle again and serving his father before he served himself.
When she was finished with the bowl she could see the loose grinds at the bottom and she thought about the cowboy stories the old ones who came into the bar used to tell about reading the grinds to tell the future. And though she stared down for a minute or more she could not tell a thing from what she saw. She rose, tipping the bowl over and using her fingers to clean out the grinds.
The bruise was still there on her thigh when she squatted down within the trees. She ran her hand across it, pressing against it to feel the tenderness of the skin. It was purple, going blue to yellow at the edges, and when she was done she lifted her pants and came out from under the trees buttoning up her jeans.
The boy had saddled up the horse and he was waiting for her. “You’ll go to find your brother now?”
“I’m going to try.”
The boy offered her his hand. “I can give you a ride as far as the high ridge,” he said. “The church is beyond another few miles and you may be able to see the smoke but I still think it is a bad idea.”
She looked at him then took his hand and pulled herself up behind him. The father came forward now. He held the chrome .38 in the flat palm of his hand like some offering.
“It was in your bedding,” the boy said, looking down at the gun in his father’s hand.
She looked at the father then looked to the boy. She thanked him and took the revolver. “It was my father’s,” she said, then, realizing she knew the word in Spanish, she said to him, “De mi padre.”
“Dónde está tu padre?”
“Dead. A car accident.”
The father clucked his tongue and shook his head. He offered his condolences. The boy started the horse up across the field, Mary May with her hands about the waist of the boy as they went, and the sheep parting around them like whitecaps seen in an ocean storm.
When she looked back toward the small campground she could only see the rise of smoke, dying now as somewhere down there the boy’s father prepared for another day.
The boy climbed the ridge, moving the horse one way and then another on a path that Mary May could see had been used before. When they came to the top the boy slid down and helped her from the horse. He pointed out the valley below and showed her where the church was, down across the valley over a few hills and farther on to where the lake lay.
“Your brother is all you have, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
WILL LOST THE TRAIL COMING UP THE AVALANCHE CHUTE. Several times he had to backtrack and find it before he could go on only to lose it again. When they came out on top of the ridge he could see it would be no help. The windswept rock barren of any sign.
He walked the edge of the ridge and looked down over the precipice at the rocks below, broad fans of talus and broken rock spread across the slope into the river valley farther on. It disappeared among the sedge, and then farther on he saw the thick darkness again of trees and brush.
When he came back, walking along the ridge the opposite way, he could see the white backs of the sheep moving in the mountain field opposite from where he stood. They were high on the mountain and he watched a rider move through them, seeing how the sheep began to part to let the rider through.
“That’s where I’d go,” Will said. “Cold and lost. I’d go to where the people are.” He looked to where Lonny was standing. He pointed out the rider and the sheep. He took up his rifle and passed the scope across the field then handed the rifle over to Lonny. “I count two men,” Will said. “I don’t see Mary May.”
Lonny took a long look through the scope then handed it back to Will. “That’s where you’d go?”
“That’s where I’d go,” Will said.
By midmorning they had crossed the river and climbed up the mountain into the field. The sheep moved about them as they walked and the two herders now stood to watch them come.
“Buenos días,” the older of the two said. He had come forward a bit from the dead firepit and watched them as they walked closer.
Will raised a hand and returned the greeting, afterward turning to look back over his shoulder at Lonny. “You speak any Spanish?”
Lonny shook his head. He was watching the two herders and he looked to Will now. “The only Mexicans I ever knew were in prison and they might as well have been in another country the way the place was divided up.”
Will looked back toward the man. “You speak any English?”
The man looked backwards at the boy, who Will could now see must have been the man’s son. The son ju
st stood there looking at the two of them and he shook his head.
“Estamos buscando . . .” Will said. He was trying to think up what to say, but he didn’t know the words. He had worked a few summers in the fields to the east when he had come back from the war, but it was a long time ago and even then he had not spoken much Spanish. “Estamos buscando for someone,” he said, making a wide and somewhat futile gesture of the surrounding world.
Again, the father looked toward the boy. The boy shrugged.
“These guys don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Lonny said. He went to stand at the fire and looked down upon the blackened rocks. “Ask them if they have any fucking food? Or liquor?” he said, looking over at Will, not even bothering to ask the father or the son. “I’d kill one of these sheep if it meant we had something to bring back out of here for John and the rest at the church.”
“Iglesia?” the father asked. He raised a hand to his chin and pantomimed stroking the long beards both Will and Lonny wore, along with all the rest of the men of Eden’s Gate.
“Yes,” Will said. “Iglesia. Both of us.” He pointed to Lonny then brought his hand back and put it to his chest. “Iglesia.”
“Ask them about the food,” Lonny said again. He had begun to walk around the small camp and he was toeing at the supplies there and the various camp ware. The boy was watching him. “Hell, ask them if they have any liquor? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Will raised a hand to his mouth. “Comida?” he asked. He was speaking to the father, but he brought his eyes around on the son.
“No,” the father said.
“No?” Lonny said. “Tell them they’re being rude.” He spoke to Will but he looked now to the boy who was standing a few feet off. “You’re being fucking rude,” Lonny said. “You understand you motherfucking mute?” Lonny leaned down, looked in under the trees then started to walk away toward where a horse was tethered. “I’m going to take their horse and take their sheep and ride the fuck out of here. I’m done with whatever this is we’re doing.”
The boy came around and stood between Lonny and the horse. In his hand was a small knife that he was holding about waist-high in front of him.